This chapter considers the significant body of women's travel writing which describes tourist visits to Norway after 1850. In the second half of the century at least ten books describing tourist trips to Norway made by women were published. This chapter considers the ways in which these women imagined and engaged with Norway, their motivations for travelling and their responses to the region. I will focus on two groups of texts: those by the first tourists, who made their journeys along with hundreds of others in the 1850s and '60s, such as Mary Spence and Isabella Blundell; and those by later travellers, whose motivations and ideas about Norway are often very different from those of their precursors. The latter group includes Olivia Stone, Violet Crompton Roberts, Edith Rhodes and Alice Ogilvie, who travelled and wrote in the 1880s and early ’90s, as tourists and accounts of Norway proliferated.

Isabella Blundell's Gamle Norge, published in 1862, describes the author's journey of a little over three months in 1860 with her brother and friends. The party took the steamer Scandinavia from Hull to Bergen and travelled extensively in the interior of Norway before finishing at its capital. Mary Spence, author of A Glimpse of Norway, likewise travelled to Norway with family. She visited the country in 1867 from Scotland and was accompanied by her sister Jessie and brother Jack. The party were travelling to Norway accompanying Jack on his journey to Arendal, where he was going to look at a mine with a view to an investment. The sisters were left in the care of Captain Nicholson, the captain of the Argo steamer, until the party were reunited at Christiania (11). They travelled for a month into the interior of the country, as far north as Lærdal and west to Bergen and the Hardangerfjord. These early travelogues by tourists to Norway from the 1850s and 1860s are written in an informal tone, directed to a female audience – a style which was to continue in the work of other women writers of travels during the remainder of the century.